Origin of Life, Theater of the Absurd

See if you can follow the logic here all the way through. Researchers sampled ancient water trapped for 1.5 billion years around what were deep-sea hydrothermal vents two kilometers under the earth's surface. The water included apparent necessities for "kick-starting" life -- like a primordial soup still in situ.

It has all the ingredients of a primordial soup. What's more, the chemicals of life -- discovered in a pocket of water that last saw the light of day 1.5 billion years ago -- appear to have formed without any influence from biological processes.

That means the idea that life got started as a result of chemical reactions around deep-sea vents looks more likely.

The rocks are the ancient remains of hydrothermal vents formed at the bottom of Earth's early oceans, and that means the water they contain could reveal important details about the chemistry that might have occurred at such vents before life began exerting its influence.

Note, they found no life, which given the overall liveliness of our planet is a quite unusual thing. Instead, it's the usual building-blocks scenario:

Now [Dr. Lollar's] colleague, Christopher Glein, has performed a raft of calculations to show that all of those molecules could have formed through perfectly feasible abiotic chemical reactions in the conditions found in such ancient hydrothermal vents.

His calculations show the conditions were particularly favourable for the formation of some key chemicals, including glyceraldehyde, one of the precursors of RNA and DNA, and pyruvate, which is important for cell metabolism.

Obtaining "building blocks" of life through an unguided natural process is one thing. Putting them together the right way, composing biological information, is something else altogether....

Here's the problem... It's like making Lego blocks and then expecting them to assemble themselves into a massive structure that is not only complex but also alive.

Or no, a better analogy would be it's like finding rocks on the beach that resemble Lego blocks, then expecting the wind and waves to fashion them into a massive structure that is not only full of information but also alive.

And sure enough, the water from the Canadian source is sterile, devoid of any hint of life, after a billion and a half years. Yet this water is taken as evidence that it looks likelier than it seemed before that this represents a model of the environment where life began.

A rare absence of life confirms the ease with which life -- biological information -- originated without design. The sterility itself actually strengthens the case! It's science as a theater of the absurd.